Feuer/Messler

Aesthetics, as Jacques Derrida famously observed, “presupposes a discourse on the limit between the inside and the outside of the art object, in this case a discourse on the frame.” A number of painters over the years have taken this discourse in hand, as it were: One thinks of Howard Hodgkin, Neil Jenney, or Christian Eckart, each in his own way an artist who has made efforts to unsettle the distinction between painting and frame, thereby leading us to wonder what, if anything, is intrinsic to the work. Another such painter is Zach Harris, a Californian who recently exhibited fifteen pieces in New York under the brain-teasing title “Central Park in a No Vex Cave.” In many of the works that were on view, the frames claimed more of the wall’s real estate than did the paintings they were ostensibly there to showcase. But then it was also hard, often enough, to say why one felt